The temptation, in arguments involving genre fiction and
literary taste, is to give up
and say, "Okay, I'm a philistine, not to mention an unlettered
slob. I like the books
anyway" -- but dammit, I'm not an unlettered slob, I'm a
professional writer with an
earned doctorate in English literature, and if that combination
doesn't qualify me to hold
an opinion on a work of fiction, I don't know what does.

The theoretical disagreement is a basic one . . . is written
science fiction
made better by making it more like serious mainstream fiction
(which it's a pretty lousy
version of, for the most part), or is it made better by making
more like something else,
and if so, what? My own theory -- of course I've got a Theory;
they don't let you out of
grad school unless you can come up with a Theory while standing
on one leg in an
empty room, which is a good description of the oral exam if you
ask me -- my own theory
is that SF novels aren't really novels, in the taxonomical
sense, at all. They're actually
romances -- again in the taxonomical, rather than the
sales-rack, sense -- and therefore
need to be judged by standards other than those which we usually
apply to novels.
Which means, among other things, that Richness of Invention (or,
as an SF reader might
put it, "lots of really neat stuff" ) will take precedence over
Realism every time.

The dictionary definition of "romance" as a genre is: "a
prose narrative treating
imaginary characters involved in events remote in time or place
and usually heroic,
adventurous, or mysterious" (which is sort of right, though the
"remote in time or place"
clause oversimplifies a much more complex quality of removal
from everyday reality.)
And the usual definition of "novel" is something on the order of
"a book-length work of
realistic prose fiction." Novel and romance, then, share the
qualities of length and
made-up-ness. Where they part company is on the vexed question
of realism -- what
kind of, in what areas, and how much -- and it's the issue of
realism that makes SF so
profoundly difficult to classify.

To start with, there are at least two different areas in
which realism can be achieved.
There's the physical realism of setting and action (yes, blood
really is that color; yes,
objects in zero-gee really do float that way; yes, the sky in
New York at midnight really
does look like that; and so on), and then there's "psychological
realism," which is where
the arguments start to get nasty.

So-called "literary" novels (I really really hate that
term, because it implies that
anything not made according to that model is not "literary,"
i.e., not art and not worthy of
the attention paid to art, but we're stuck with the phrase until
something better comes
along) . . . ahem, let me start over . . . so-called "literary"
novels look for both kinds of
realism but give pride of place to the latter. Science fiction,
on the other hand, pays a
peculiar and obsessive kind of attention to the first kind of
realism, but frequently ignores
modern notions of psychological realism completely. (In
inferior examples, this produces
cardboard characters; in superior ones, characters like Lois
McMaster Bujold's Miles
Vorkosigan, who are memorably larger-than-life.) And in any
case, science fiction is
employing the kind of realism that it does use in the
interest of doing a profoundly
unrealistic thing: those "adventures remote in time or
place" we encountered in
the definition of romance.

Why does all this occupy my mind to the extent that it causes
me to break out into
multi-screen posts at the push of a button?

Because there are, as I see it, two conflicting artistic
ideologies working to shape
contemporary science fiction. Both parties want to make the
genre better, everybody
involved seriously cares about what they're doing and why
they're doing it . . . and their
prescriptions for improvement are, I think, mutually exclusive.
One group believes that
contemporary SF becomes "better" as it draws closer to the
"modern realistic prose
fiction" pole; but other people (me included) believe that
striving to make SF more like
serious mainstream fiction isn't going to get you good SF, it's
going to get you second-rate
mainstream, and that Step One toward achieving best-of-breed SF
is the recognition that
the proper model to emulate isn't The Novel at all, but The
Romance.

I could go on like this for hours. Somebody stop me before I
theorize again . . . .

And the question comes up from the floor, "What specific
romances-in-the-broad-sense do you think might be good models
for SF?"

Speaking for myself, as a medievalist I tend to draw strongly
on that particular body of literature
-- I don't think it's a coincidence that SF and fantasy are a
haven for refugees from my old
discipline. Norse sagas were a big influence on me, especially
their combination of
understated style and larger-than-life characters (a saga isn't
a romance in the technical
sense, of course; it's a separate form of its own, with roots in
historiography and
hagiography of all things . . . but don't get me started on
that, either). Of the later
stuff, Dumas was important to me, for the sense of panache which
mainstream realistic
prose fiction sadly lacks. And let's not forget Melville's
Moby-Dick, which is
usually regarded as a novel but which actually has a strong
romance component in its
makeup -- it definitely shares romance's (and good SF's)
combination of exciting stuff
happening to larger-than-life characters (what Northrop Frye
called fiction in the high
mimetic mode), as well as SF's obsessive attention to realism
and technical detail in
particular areas (think about all those chapters on whales and
whaling -- in an SF story,
that'd be the point where the narrator spends a block of time
talking about the
hyperspace equations.) To make a long list short, however: I
think that an aspiring SF
romancer should read all sorts of nonmodern and/or nonwestern
long prose fiction, just
for the demonstration that the thing we call "novel" isn't the
only booklike object that can
be written within those parameters.

And I believe that those of us who write SF-as-romance
(as opposed to
"romantic SF" and "SF romances," which have their own
problems both with the
mainstream and within SF, but which aren't what we're talking
about right here) need to
stop thinking of ourselves as throwbacks to a more primitive
era, or as the sleazy lower
class of an increasingly respectable genre, and own up to being
the countervailing literary force that
we are and that I believe the field itself needs us to be.